Knife Fights

by John A. Nagl

  In this theatre the whole mode of fighting was to differ from what it had been. No great battles awaited Alexander; he was to be faced by a people’s war, a war of mounted guerrillas who, when he advanced would suddenly appear in his rear, who entrenched themselves on inaccessible crags, and when pursued vanished into the Turkoman steppes. To overrun such a theatre of war and subdue such an enemy demanded generalship of the highest order, much higher than needed against an organized army on the plains.1

  I read voraciously into the long history of guerrilla warfare, from ancient to modern times. An important moment of insight came while reading T. E. Lawrence’s classic book Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph, Lawrence’s memoir of his leadership of a guerrilla Arab rebellion against the Ottoman Empire’s conventional forces during the First World War. I was reading Lawrence in the bathtub of our apartment, having returned from a run through Port Meadow with a friend who was studying the foreign policy of Pope John Paul II, when I discovered Lawrence’s malaria-infused musing on the problems that his band of insurgents posed to the conventional army that opposed them. “War upon rebellion was messy and slow,” he wrote, “like eating soup with a knife.” It was a eureka moment; I immediately knew that I had found the title of my dissertation. I couldn’t wait to give Susi the good news, but she was rather less excited about it and encouraged me to get dressed lest the neighbors complain.

  Seven words down, ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred, and ninety-three to go. To meet the hundred-thousand-word requirement, I had decided to compare the British Army’s experience fighting insurgency in Malaya from 1948 to 1960 with that of the U.S. Army in Vietnam. In both cases, armies that had been prepared to fight other conventional armies had had to adapt to a very different kind of war, changing their doctrine, organization, and to a certain extent even their concept of themselves if they wanted to win.

  The British fought their campaign in the multiethnic colony of Malaya, which is today independent of Britain and known as Malaysia. Their opponents were Communist insurgents, mostly ethnic Chinese, many of whom had fought against the Japanese occupiers of Malaya during the Second World War. In the aftermath of that war, the insurgents wanted independence from Britain and resorted to terror and assassination in an attempt to get it. (The Brits, like most empires, had a continuing problem with rebellious colonists.)

  The British Army fumbled its initial response badly, as conventional armies tend to do when facing an unfamiliar enemy. Fresh from their victory against the armies of Japan and Germany, British battalion and brigade commanders at first focused their attention on sweeps of hundreds of troops through the jungle aimed at the insurgent forces. Although the British Army had gained substantial experience in fighting small-unit jungle actions against the Japanese during the Second World War, the rapid demobilization of the Far Eastern Forces afterward combined with the dominance of the Western European experience in the careers of most regular soldiers to promote a “conventional” attitude to the war against the Malayan insurgents. Susi and I visited a number of somewhat aged veterans of these conflicts in day trips from Oxford that generally included pitchers of gin and tonic and, as a result, indecipherable notes from the meetings. One of them was the charming Richard Clutterbuck, whose description of the British tactics from those early years of the war, which the troops called “jungle bashing,” is astoundingly similar to accounts of U.S. units in Vietnam:

  The predilection of some army officers for major operations seems incurable. Even in the late 1950s, new brigade commanders would arrive from England, nostalgic for World War II, or fresh from large-scale maneuvers in Germany. On arrival in Malaya, they would address themselves with chinagraphs [grease pencils] to a map almost wholly green except for one red pin. “Easy,” they would say. “Battalion on the left, battalion on the right, battalion blocking the end, and then a fourth battalion to drive through. Can’t miss, old boy.” Because it took the better part of a day, with more than a thousand soldiers, to get an effective cordon even a half-mile square around a jungle camp, the guerrillas, hearing the soldiers crashing through the jungle into position, had no difficulty getting clear before the net was closed. Except for a rare brush with a straggler, all the soldiers ever found was an empty camp, but this enabled the officers to claim they had “cleared the area of enemy.” This would be duly marked on the maps, and the commanders would go to bed with a glow of satisfaction over a job well done. The soldiers, nursing their blisters, had other words for it.2

  Over time innovative younger officers developed more effective techniques to defeat the guerrillas at their own game by gaining the support of the local people. Flexible senior officers emphasized the interrelationship of political and military goals and encouraged the creation, testing, and implementation of more effective counterinsurgency doctrine. The new tactics brought results, reinforcing the learning process by providing the innovative junior leaders with tangible proof of the importance of their efforts. The British public’s patience and acceptance of the traditional role of the British Army in policing the empire—limited wars to achieve limited objectives—provided support for the long effort, which ended when the freely elected government of Malaya finally declared the Emergency over in 1960. The British Army had successfully adapted to overcome the challenges of a Communist insurgent war and an obsolete doctrine in what became seen as the classic case of successful Western counterinsurgency in the twentieth century.

  The lessons of Malaya are many; I often joke that they include fighting insurgents on an island or peninsula with borders that can be easily defended against infiltration, choosing enemies who are easily visibly distinguishable from the majority of the population, and fighting insurgents before CNN is invented to turn an unblinking eye on tactics and procedures that may sap domestic and international support for the effort. Malaya is famous as the shining example of the “hearts and minds” school of counterinsurgency, the idea that the population must be protected in order to allow them to reveal the identity and location of the insurgents. The phrase was popularized by British General Sir Gerald Templer, “The Tiger of Malaya,” who was the source of much of the counterinsurgency learning that marked the campaign. Templer later said that he regretted the phrase, and in fact he oversaw the use of techniques that would be seen today as relying upon excessive force, including resettling entire communities in concentration camps and limiting food distribution to civilians to prevent its donation to insurgents. Still, the Malayan campaign demonstrated that armies could adapt to defeat insurgencies, although the process was just as messy and slow as Lawrence described. The Brits took twelve years to figure it out and finish the war on favorable terms.

  I found the comparison with the Americans in Vietnam instructive. Taking over a war against Vietnamese guerrillas who had been fighting the French for independence for the better part of a decade, the U.S. Army struggled to understand the enemy it was facing and the tactics it should use against them. Dwight Eisenhower had wisely refused to bail out the French when a large force was trapped and forced to surrender at Dien Bien Phu, ending the French colonial experience in Asia but leaving behind a power vacuum. Ike had deployed just under a thousand advisers to the country by the time his presidency was over. It was John F. Kennedy who was determined to fight against Communist insurgency wherever it presented itself, noting in his inaugural address America’s determination to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” And eighteen months later, in his speech at the graduation of the West Point Class of 1962, Kennedy warned the young officers of the difficulty of the task ahead:

  Where there is a visible enemy to fight in open combat, the answer is not so difficult. Many serve, all applaud, and the tide of patriotism runs high. But when there is a long, slow struggle, with no immediately visible foe, your choice will seem hard indeed.

  The choices were harder than President Kennedy ever could have imagined, b
oth for policy makers in Washington and for the army in the field. In a war that was far more complex than the Malayan Emergency, American arms did what they knew how to do, a strategy that was titled “search and destroy” but could just as well have been called “jungle bashing.” William Westmoreland, the Army general who commanded American troops during the critical years of the war, wrote in his memoirs:

  Base camps established all units were constantly on the offensive, seeking any enemy that might be encountered: guerrillas, local force, or main force. This is not to say that the men were constantly under fire, as they might have been in a prolonged conventional campaign. As often as not, the enemy was not to be found.3

  There were many who argued for a different strategy when fighting ghostlike enemies in Vietnam, more akin to the one that the British had eventually adopted and proven successful in Malaya. The U.S. Marine Corps implemented a concept it called the Combined Action Platoon, which stationed small units of Marines with Vietnamese forces inside villages to protect the population; despite its initial success, General Westmoreland prohibited it for not being offensive-minded and violent enough. Unhappy with the results he was seeing, Army Chief of Staff Harold K. Johnson commissioned a high-level study of the conduct of the war in mid-1965. Under the leadership of General Creighton Abrams, the Program for the Pacification and Long-Term Development of South Vietnam (PROVN) group was tasked with “developing new courses of action to be taken in South Vietnam by the United States and its allies, which will, in conjunction with current actions, modified as necessary, lead in due time to successful accomplishment of U.S. aims and objectives.”4 The results were striking: a repudiation of the Army’s current emphasis on search and destroy operations and a move toward pacification through winning the population over to the government’s cause. The final report of the PROVN study, submitted to Johnson in March 1966, stated:

  The situation in South Vietnam has seriously deteriorated. 1966 may well be the last chance to ensure eventual success. “Victory” can only be achieved through bringing the individual Vietnamese, typically a rural peasant, to support willingly the GVN. The critical actions are those that occur at the village, district, and provincial levels. This is where the war must be fought; this is where that war and the object which lies beyond it must be won.5

  But General Westmoreland was unable to change his spots, and the Army continued his search and destroy strategy until Creighton Abrams replaced him in July 1968, after the Tet Offensive in February of that year had shaken American support for the war to its core. Great powers do not lose small wars because they run out of tanks, soldiers, or money. If a great power like the United States loses a relatively small war like Vietnam, it does so because of a lack of public support at home. After Tet, the American people lost faith in their Army’s ability to win the war in Vietnam at a reasonable cost, and it is hard to blame them for their dismay and doubt. The killing of American college students at Kent State by National Guard soldiers symbolized a country at war with itself.

  In Malaya, the British military had learned quickly enough to keep the British population “on side,” a task that was easier in an earlier day without the focused eye of the global media watching every move. In Vietnam, the American military had also learned from the bottom up, but the high command did not absorb the lessons until disaster on the battlefield shook national confidence in the war effort. Learning in a large organization, I concluded, is a process in which subordinates close to the point of the spear identify problems and suggest solutions—a common trait of all successful businesses. The key variable in determining whether organizations adapt or die is not at the lower levels but at the top: key leaders have to determine that real change is required. If they make that decision, it is comparatively easy to transmit instructions on how to respond to changes in the environment; in the military, such instructions are called “doctrine,” and they are codified in field manuals, leader development courses, and training scenarios.

  My thinking was heavily influenced by Richard Downie, an Army colonel who had written his own doctoral dissertation on how armies learn after conflicts and published it under the title Learning from Conflict: The U.S. Military in Vietnam, El Salvador, and the Drug War. His dissertation had been titled The U.S. Army as Learning Organization; it was clear that he did not view the title as an oxymoron.

  Sir Michael Howard, whose theatrical Oxford lectures I had had the good fortune to attend, once wrote that “in structuring and preparing an army for war, you can be clear that you will not get it precisely right, but the important thing to ensure is that it is not too far wrong, so that you can put it right quickly.” The reason innovation is so hard in military organizations is that they face real enemies very seldom—generally once in a generation. As a result, doctrine can go very far wrong—even to the point of completely ignoring doctrine for an entire, and ancient, kind of warfare that presents enormously difficult challenges for conventional military forces. And that, of course, is what the U.S. Army did when it turned its back on Vietnam and other “small wars.”

  Organizational Learning Chart.

  Michael Howard had been the Chichele Professor of the History of War at All Souls’ College before becoming the Regius Professor of History. (Oxford offers great job titles and splendid office space, although the salaries are not commensurate with the prestige.) His successor in the Chichele Chair was Robert O’Neill, an Australian military academy graduate and Rhodes scholar. Bob was a veteran of Vietnam as well as of my two theses; which experience marked him more deeply is an open question. My master’s dissertation, on American and Japanese economic and military relations after the Second World War, had been heavily influenced by an American spending her junior year abroad who studied those subjects, but specialized in pubs, during my first year at Oxford. I knew nothing about Japan and little about economics, as my master’s marks showed, but I learned a lot about JYAs and British drinking culture during that first year. Despite my questionable priorities while earning my master’s, Bob signed up to supervise my doctoral dissertation as well, although he was more careful about providing oversight of my research topic than he had been the first time.

  Bob was also the senior member of the Oxford University Strategic Studies Group (OUSSG), a club for those interested in geopolitics and strategy for which I served as vice president while earning my master’s degree and later as president during my D.Phil. studies, gaining invaluable experience in chairing meetings, asking hard questions of senior people, and managing a budget. Bob and his wife, Sally, were the best of mentors and friends, an oasis of unpretentious competence and compassion in what can be a very hard place for Americans to understand. The experience of working with Bob again, the joy of spending time visiting various historic sites in England with Susi and her mother, who lived nearby, and the wonder of hearing firsthand stories of the Malayan Emergency and the broader British retreat from empire at the knees of veterans of those campaigns (always with a gin and tonic in hand) were some of the greatest of the gifts we shared in that time of gifts. I headed to West Point in the summer of 1997 clutching my freshly minted doctorate with hopes of a bestselling counterinsurgency book dancing through my head.

  Bob O’Neill in Vietnam.

  From Bob’s able hands, I was passed to those of another Vietnam veteran and student of international affairs: Colonel Daniel Kaufman, who had been my sponsor when I was a West Point cadet and was now professor and head of the department of Social Sciences at West Point, which I was joining as an assistant professor. Dan had played an important role in sending me back to graduate school on the banks of the Thames to earn my Ph.D. and in ensuring that I got it done well within the required two years by threatening me with bodily harm if I failed to do so. I soon found myself on Dan’s front porch, Sam Adams in hand, overlooking the Hudson River and comparing my stories of Desert Storm and Oxford with his rather more significant tales of Vietnam and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he had earned his master’s and d
octorate. Colonel Kaufman was in a mood for reminiscing, remembering a visit I had paid to his office after Christmas of my freshman year at West Point, first semester grades in hand. After examining them with an experienced eye, Colonel Kaufman had told me to pay attention, then said: “This is what you’re going to do, son. You’re going to major in international relations, become an armor officer, get a Rhodes scholarship, study international relations at Oxford, and then come back to teach for me here in the Sosh Department. What are your questions?”

  Dan and Kathryn Kaufman in Atlanta in 2013, still feeding me thirty years after I arrived on their doorstep as a West Point plebe in 1984.

  I had none. Sitting on the porch, Dan asked me if I remembered that visit (as if I could forget it), then told me that a decade later he was finally going to be in a position to officially appraise my performance as what the Army called my “senior rater,” and that he had boiled it down to a single sentence of only three words. Confident in my role as straight man, I asked him what that sentence would be. Dan replied, “Officer follows instructions.”

  The department of Social Sciences teaches economics, political science, and international relations to West Point cadets, some of whom in their turn become Sosh professors, or “p’s,” themselves, in an endless cycle of service in foreign conflicts, good graduate schools, and self-replication. This is one of the great strengths of West Point, which sees its mission as “to educate, train, and inspire the Corps of Cadets.” Army captains fresh from the battlefields of Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq—or even the simulated battlefields of the National Training Center—may not be the best of all possible educators, but they could certainly train and inspire malleable cadets like me. My own role models as a cadet included Steve Daffron, a cavalryman who taught economics and became a very senior banker at J. P. Morgan after leaving the Army; Jay Parker, the least likely infantryman the Army had ever seen who was famous for his “Politics and Film” class, erudition, and disorganization; and an Army captain named David Petraeus, who had stood out even in that band of hard-charging soldier-scholars. No slouch in spotting talent, I confidently picked Petraeus to make full-bird colonel for sure and ended up spending the summer before my final year at West Point with him on an internship at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE).